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Saturday, January 25, 2014

#887: Yingguang Liu

Yingguang Liu is a young earth creationist affiliated with
Creation Ministries International and Professor of Applied Science at Maranatha Baptist Bible College, where he “teaches
biology on a level that threatens the neoDarwinian paradigm every day” (he has
no educational background in biology). “Creation science should include all
scientific studies of creation,” says Liu: “My goal is to equip young
Christians with the scientific knowledge and skills needed to strengthen their
faith in a world of humanistic chauvinism. Good science done by creationists is
a testimony to those who accuse fundamentalist Christians of being ignorant or
anti-scientific,” which must be understood in a peculiar light given Liu’s
thorough denialism of most of science. His current research interest is human
endogenous retroviruses, and he has published such groundbreaking papers as “Were
retroviruses created good?” in The
Journal of Biblical and Scientific Studies (the article is discussed here;
apparently Liu isn’t particularly concerned with facts, but that isn’t
particularly surprising).

Together with creationist Charles Soper (who seems to be
working in London) he also published “The Natural History of Retroviruses” in Volume 2 of Answers in Genesis’s house journal Answers Research Journal,
which is a review paper of research done by other people on this topic. It even
raises some challenges to creationism (“The findings of comparative genomics
around the syncytin-1 loci is especially challenging to creationists. The gene
is well conserved among hominoids – humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans,
and gibbons, but not in the Old World Monkeys”), which the paper dismisses
simply as examples of common descent after the Fall degradation of the genome – without even trying to provide evidence or explanation apart from the bald
assertion that this is a better alternative explanation to natural selection.

And just to make sure: Maranatha Baptist Bible College is
not a place to go for an education in reality-related matters. In addition to
Liu, their Applied Science faculty includes people like Bud Downs, a Minister
who is working on supplementing biology textbooks with a creationist
perspective, and the chair is one Curt Malmanger, who has an MS in mathematics
education and a BS in Bible. Needless to say, none of the facutly are
scientists or have any background in anything resembling scientific research.

Diagnosis: Typical hardcore creationists who seem equally
surprised every time their claims are met with requests for evidence or
alignment with reality – when you have Jesus on your side, such requests are
rather preposterous, aren’t they?